I'm not sure why there was so much talk about 'nanomachines' some years ago when there are literally millions of pre-existing examples that are so vastly more sophisticated.
> Oh, I agree, imagine a "grey goo" apocalypse, where uncontrolled and hyper-aggressive nanotechnology spreads everywhere in a unceasing orgy of consumption and replication. Mutating according to its own unknowable logic, it eventually it covers the land in an inhospitable blanket of massive crawling megastructures and inscrutable malign hive-minds!
> ... Oh, wait, that happened -- It's us. :P
When you talk to other people who don't have kids, they always make sure to let you know they don't.
The death of a cancer's host body is like our equivalent of our star dying, and I guess our equivalent of interplanetary colonization would be a hypothetical cancer's ability to jump between hosts.
Cancer can and does bring about the death of its host.
(One might argue that both humans and other life forms have the potential and/or demonstrated capability to transform their own ecosystem beyond its viability to continue to sustain and support them, with both the present anthropogenic greenhouse-gas-based global warming and the Great Oxygenation Event and subsequent Snowball Earth serving as examples.)
That said, I understand your analogy.
There are virally- and clonally-transmitted or otherwise contagious cancers:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer>
(These are rare and seldom found in humans.)
Nothing intelligent is happening. Zero-foresight self-amplifying systems that will inevitably crash out will simply amplify themselves to that point, then cease. Applications to areas outside of oncology are an exercise for the reader.
The thing with evolution is that it is random. So sometimes it really doesn’t make any logical sense.
Different primary tumors (eg Prostate, breast, lung) have preferred sets of metastasis sites that are not always explained by where they get stuck due to getting into the blood supply. Even getting into the blood supply requires functions of degrading extra cellular matrix, evading immune surveillance, getting out of blood vessels and “setting up camp” at the news destination, and those requirements can be cancer and/or met site preferential.
Much of the immune suppression mechanisms are actually regulated systems normal cells use to prevent runaway inflammation. Cancer finds that function and highjacks it to “hide”. Conversely (to further illustrate complexity), some cancers use aspects inflammation as ”fuel” to drive tumor growth especially early in the cancer. I do agree- it is all truly fascinating.with that said: Fu*k cancer.
"Whoever created the mosquito's eye ,created the sun. Whoever ordered the flea' stomach, ordered the solar system." from Quran's light
And I’d also point out that these functions that are “sought after” by cancer are not all de novo, some things are complex functions that encoded for use by other normal cells at a other times and places in development of the organism. Some key mutations that enable the use of those functions by the cancer are crucial moments cancer development. Also many key mutations are loss of functions, which are often easier to accumulate. A example of genetic Losses of function is losing “contact inhibition” where normal cells stop growing when they get neighbors. Cancer cells loose this inhibition and just continue growing. This alone would require a suite of mutations. Another comment in the thread talks about cancer evolution and the good of the organism not making sense. Cancer doesn’t care about the organism. The organism has evolved many layers of checks and balances that can work for decades, but throw in time and poisons like smoking, UV damage, and there will be loopholes found. Cancer is persistent and has the entire genome of functions to turn on and off in various ways. Seriously Fu*k cancer.
Isn't this just selection bias on a grand scale? You're looking at a specimen where the parts happened to end up arranged in a way that allows it to exhibit these properties that seem like coordination, while not paying much attention to the quintillions of specimens that did not.